I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

I think a case can be made that religion is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

Doris DayThe really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it!

Moshe DayanFreedom is the oxygen of the soul.

Play is the highest form of research.

Nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.

James DeanDream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow.

Eugène DelacroixThe primary job of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

Do all the work you can. That is the complete philosophy to lead a good life.

Mediocre people know an answer for everything and never wonder about anything.

Artists who strive for perfection in everything are those who don't achieve it in anything.

Experience teaches two thing. First is we must correct a great deal, and second that we ought not to correct too much.

Don DelilloTechnology is lust removed from nature. ("White Noise")

Were people this dumb before television? ("White Noise")

Deng Xiao-ping To get rich is glorious!

Keep a cool head, maintain a low profile and never take the lead.

It doesn't matter whether it's a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice.

Andrew DentonPressure and stress is the common cold of the psyche.

Talent is a gift, sure, but it's a bugger unwrapping it.

The true definition of wealth is being able to buy someone else's time.

Love is that warm spot to the right of fear and the left of desire that we're all searching for.

Why is it that the people with the most faith (fundamentalists) are also the people with the most fear?

The degree of a socieRené DescartesI think, so I am - Cogito, ergo sum.

People quarrel because they haven't learned to argue.

Everything which is merely probable is probably wrong.

To solve a difficulty divide it into as many parts as possible.

When insulted, I try to raise my soul so high that the insult cannot reach it.

To know what people really think, watch what they do, rather than what they say.

The surest way to be deceived is by thinking to be more clever than everybody else.

Nothing is more justly distributed than reason. Everyone is convinced to have sufficient of it.

John DeweyIf we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our students of their tomorrow.

Nick DiamosNever attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Charles DickensLord, keep my memory green.

A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature .

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

Cheerfulness and content are great beautifiers and famous preservers of good looks.

I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

Denis DiderotPassions elevate the soul to great things.

If you are going the wrong way you make it worse the faster you go.

Joan DidionTo free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves -- there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Marlene DietrichSex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.

Most women try everything to change a man. But once that's done they don't like him any more.

Men always insist that they love the inner beauty of women. But strangely, they keep staring at something quite different.

E.J.DijkstraComputer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Phyllis DillerWhatever you may look like, marry a man your own age -- as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.

Isak DinesenI don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

DiogenesWho is happy with nothing has everything.

The foundation of each state is the education of its youth.

The best revenge on your enemies is to become better than they are.

He is not the happiest who possesses most, but he who needs the least.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Dionysius of HalicarnassusLet your speech be better than silence, or be silent.

Walt DisneyIf you can dream it, you can do it.

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Benjamin DisraeliChange is constant.

Never apologise, never explain.

No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.

It destroys one's nerve to be amiable every day to the same human being.

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Heimito von DodererSometimes you have to withdraw from a person to find him.

In a good conversation the pauses are as important as the words.

Fedor DostoevskyTo love someone means to see him as God intended him.

The degree of a society's civilisation can be judged by entering its prisons ("House of the Dead")

Yadin DudaiFor the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering - sometimes more so.

Mikhail DudanPoetry is not a profession, it is a destiny.

Charles H. Duell (US Office of Patents 1899)Everything that can be invented has been invented

Michael DuffyUrban consolidation is like socialism: the ideals are wonderful, the reality awful.

Mike DukakisThe future is so bright I have to wear shades.

John Foster DullesIf you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.

Our capacity to retaliate must be ... massive in order to deter all forms of aggression.

A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good.

The principle of neutrality ... except under very special circumstances, is an immoral and shortsighted conception.

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to solve, but whether it's the same problem you had last year.

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good.

Alexandre DumasHappier than happy are those who make others happy.

Business - that's easy to define: it's other people's money.

Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

Isadora DuncanVirtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

Alexis DupuyMen marry to make an end; women to make a beginning.

Tilla DurieuxHope is something between wings and a parachute.

Friedrich DürrenmattThe more we plan the more profoundly will chance hit us.

Aziz DweikA hungry man is an angry man.

Wayne DyerEverything is perfect in the universe -- even your desire to improve it.

Henry van DykeSome people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.

Happiness is inward, and not outward; and so it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are.

Bob DylanChaos is a friend of mine.

Money doesn't talk, it swears.

Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into everyone's hands, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

The non-living universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organisation that are not yet understood.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

Dzerzhinsky (head of secret police under Lenin)We stand for organised terror... Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution... even if its sword does by chance sometimes fall on the heads of the innocent.